Towards Intersectional Democratic Innovations

Abstract

While scholarship on intersectionality has emphasised the need to go beyond single categories of identity, like gender or race, intersectionality has not been considered to date within the literature on democratic innovations, even though enhancing inclusion is a key aim of such institutions. This article overcomes this gap. It analyses tools of inclusion within democratic innovations and argues they are not responsive to intersectionality claims. This article shows that current democratic innovations are explicitly exclusionary towards the groups which need the attention of the democratic scholars the most. To address this problem, this article argues for a move away from advocating for single or 'one-off' acts of inclusion and towards a more direct focus on facilitating leadership of the disempowered and diversification of the contexts of democratic innovations. Such changes can increase the sensitivity of democratic innovations but can also facilitate a wider social change.

Looking to the future? Including children, young people and future generations in deliberations on climate action: Ireland's Citizens’Assembly 2016–2018

“…It is one of the approaches Wojciechowska (2019) recommends as a means of including groups that are traditionally marginalised or indeed overlooked in processes that use sortition. Providing a safe, supportive space, enclave deliberations can facilitate excluded groups in clarifying their common aims, strengthening their arguments and developing recommendations (Wojciechowska 2019). They can also help build capacity within a cohort.…”

Rethinking Representation and Diversity in Deliberative Minipublics

“…Second, even if everyone has an equal chance of being invited, it does not thereby follow that all have an equal chance of participating (Smith 2009;Wojciechowska 2019). Such considerations can be used to motivate stratified random sampling, which several scholars have advocated (Rowe & Frewer 2000;Longstaff & Burgess 2010;O'Doherty & Burgess 2013).…”

“…They are multiple in the sense that people fall under several overlapping social categories (e.g., gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation), and dynamic in that categories need not be viewed as discrete (e.g., gender may be viewed as a continuum along which a person may move rather than as a fixed dichotomy between male and female). Intersectionality is also specifically focused on cases in which multiple socially disadvantaged attributes apply to a person (e.g., black female homosexual), and suggests that the total impact of overlapping disadvantages tends to be greater than the sum of the effects considered separately (Wojciechowska 2019). In Kimberlé Crenshaw's (1989) classic formulation, failure to appreciate intersectionality results in implicitly understanding sexism as it is experienced by white women and racism as it confronts black men, making discrimination faced by black women difficult to communicate and remedy.…”

Asserting disadvantaged communities’ deliberative agency in a media-saturated society

“…The public sphere is vulnerable to cognitive shortcuts based on dominant narratives, which, in turn shapes the discourses in the deliberative system (see Holdo and Sagrelius 2019 ). Viewed this way, inclusion of low-income communities is not just about giving them voice to express their preferences as the development literature emphasises, but also an exercise for them to problematise their identities, reflect on their hopes and grievances in relation to other discourses in the public sphere, and recognise the intersections of different forms of marginality to contribute to conversations about the common good (see Wojiechowska 2019 ). All these are essential for a deliberative system if disadvantaged communities were truly to be included in consequential deliberations.…”